This time, he doesn’t hesitate. I watch him clamber aboard the boat and I rest my backside against the sea wall and raise my hand. A farewell, a salute, a thank you.
He stands at the bow of the boat as the engines power up, and as it begins to reverse, he cups his hands around his mouth and shouts something to me. The wind catches his words, delivering them to me just as the boat turns away towards open waters.
‘Three – I don’t regret you.’
I stand there sobbing as I yell it back at the top of my lungs, bent forward with the effort, hoping the wind will be as reliable a messenger to him as it was to me. And I don’t. I don’t regret a single second of us, but right now it feels as if, in mending him, I’ve broken a part of myself.
It’s been eight hours now since Mack left. I’m not ashamed to say I cried like a lost child as soon as I walked back into the safe haven of Otter Lodge. He laid a fire before he left to make sure there was a warm welcome waiting for me, but there wasn’t because he wasn’t there any more. For such a small space, it feels cavernous without his belongings. No huge red coat hanging on the back of the door, no camera parts littering the table, no unfamiliar toiletries mixed with mine in the bathroom.
I sat outside on the porch steps first thing this morning while he packed, dolphin-watching with my morning coffee rather than witness him extricate himself piece by piece. You might suppose it would be easier because I always knew that it was going to end so abruptly. You’d be wrong. I think back to the moment I was bold enough to suggest we throw caution to the wind and I wonder if I’d do the same again if I knew then how I’d feel now. Probably. Definitely. Of course I would because my time with Mack has been magnificent. There’s a price to pay for full immersion in a warm bath of beautiful, sudden love, though. You know that moment when you step out of the bath and snatch for your towel to get dry and warm again? There’s no towel. I’m shivering. I’m exposed and alone, and I have to stand here like this until the sun dries me off, eventually. I realize I’ve unintentionally broken one of my vows: protect myself from harm. Because make no bones about it, this feels like harm. As if I’m injured, as if a piece of me has been amputated. It’s shocking to me that I didn’t know him a month ago. It’s such an insignificant amount of time, too short, surely, for someone to impact my life so much. Am I being foolish to attach such weight to our short affair? No. I’ve been in relationships before where I’ve got to know someone in hops and catches, a couple of hours at the cinema, an afternoon at the Tate, home again alone for days in between. Those relationships lasted weeks or months or even years but were never emotionally as long, and definitely not as intense. We’ve rowed, we’ve laughed, we’ve cried and we’ve loved. And now we’ve said goodbye. Our snow-globe romance, a perfectly encased beginning, middle and end. I drag the quilt from the bed to the sofa and stare into the fire, remembering, even though it would be more beneficial to forget. I don’t want to forget Mack Sullivan. Will he fade from my mind no matter how hard I try to hold on? I don’t have his photographs to look back on. I don’t have anything to remember him by. At least while I’m here on the island, I can see him everywhere I look – down by the shore as I stand at the kitchen window, across the table from me at breakfast, beside me in bed if I wake in the middle of the night. But I won’t have those familiar comforts when I leave Salvation. When I leave the island, I’ll leave the last traces of us behind me on the sand. I don’t want to go.
Mack
29 October
Boston
I KNOW WHAT ENDINGS FEEL LIKE
I haven’t let anyone know I’m coming home today. I’ve moved through the last couple of days on autopilot, away from Cleo, closer to the kids. I dragged my bags through Arrivals at Logan, acutely aware in a way I’ve never been before of the sheer scale of the place, the noise, the volume of people. In some ways, the anonymity of the city is welcome; in another way, I ache for the rhythmic sound of the ocean, the peaty, salted taste of Salvation air, the smell of Cleo’s hair.
I miss her violently. I swing between feeling like a fool for allowing things to spiral out of control and justifying it to myself as unavoidable. Damn, she was brave to lay it on the line, not knowing how I’d react. Truth is, the minute she lowered her defences, mine washed away like Salvation sand at high tide. It does her a great disservice to suggest that it was just a ‘right time, right place’ thing. If anything, it was a ‘right person, wrong time’ thing – for both of us. I have too much going on in my life, too many unresolved feelings here to contemplate moving on with a woman who lives half a world away. Besides, Cleo has too complicated a relationship with herself at the moment to be in the right place for a romantic partner. She’s craving a period of self-reliance – she needs to focus her love inwards before she can afford to give any away. Somewhere down the line, though, it’s inevitable that she’ll meet someone new and he’ll be the luckiest guy on the planet. I have no right to feel kicked in the teeth at the idea of her with someone else, but I do. I feel like I’ve crash-landed back on the unforgiving grey sofa in the furnished apartment I call home these days and it’s horrendous. I chose it purely because it’s ten minutes from the kids. I’ve no clue who lives next door. I don’t want to become part of the community or take in packages for the neighbours. Photographs of the boys are the only personal items I’ve bothered to put up. It would take me less than half an hour to clear my stuff out of here, intentionally ready at a moment’s notice to go home. Home. How much more complicated that is now that there’s Robert. And Cleo too, I guess. I’m going to have to tell Susie about her. Not that I feel as if I did anything wrong, but how can we discuss Robert without me being upfront too? Not that it’s the same thing. Cleo isn’t going to be part of the boys’ lives. She won’t help them with their homework or read them stories at night. They’ll never even know her name. The thought of Robert doing any of those things flattens me, a hard shove on my solar plexus that has me lying back on the sofa with a hand on my chest. I close my eyes and visualize myself back on Salvation Island. I’m standing on top of Wailing Hill and down below I can see lights in the windows of Otter Lodge and smoke rising from the chimney. It’s a little after five in the afternoon here in Boston, which makes it just after ten at night in Ireland. Cleo might be curled up on the sofa with her laptop, or perhaps she’s having trouble sleeping and is out on the porch steps looking at the stars with a shot of whiskey in her hands? God, if only I could snap my fingers and be next to her in a heartbeat. I press against my chest, feeling for the beating shard she embedded there, and in my head I walk down the hill to wrap a blanket around her shoulders. I hope she was right about the connection. I hope that wherever she is right now, she’s just paused and unexpectedly thought of me.